Ascher/Straus - Bibliography

Featured Work

Monica's Chronicle
Monica’s Chronicle, endless sketchbook drawn directly from life yet a model of another idea of fiction and the source of much of Ascher/Straus’s work (most obviously ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party), can be read here in installments as it’s being edited.

An excerpt from later in MONICA'S CHRONICLE that may be helpful in understanding how central it is to our lifetime of work, particularly for Sheila Ascher's life and work:

"Without knowing why — why exactly — Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself: at what point she (or it) realized that there is no story. That is: what's ordinarily meant by the word 'story' is itself a fiction. In reality, as soon as a story begins to get told a digression veers off from it. And, while the first digression from the original story is still being chronicled, another digression veers off from that. And so on. It's the natural way of the never-ending horizontal narration that Monica loves. Stories in other stories and other stories in that. Stories crossing uninvited through stories on their way to something else. Magnetic clustering of stories: 'the magnetic principle' of chronicling over panoramic duration. Events with at least one thing in common are attracted to one another in a material way, creating little clusters that Monica's always enjoyed cataloguing. What's seen and chronicled out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye. The true way stories exist, open to chance, interrupted by accident, porous, intruded on, distracted, oddly magnetic, attracted to what's ambient around them, the overheard and the-lives-of-others always leaking into what we thought was the story. What others lazily call 'realism' just another set of conventions that pays no attention to the impossibly multiple reality occurring around and through the tightly-focused groove it's trekking through. In the same way, it seems to Monica, what's celebrated as 'imagination' seems to have its gaze aimed above the infinite surface of the world.

"Monica or the Chronicle asks herself/itself (when? when exactly?) another question:

"Did the Chronicle take its present shape because Monica reached these conclusions? Or is the Chronicle simply the inevitable result of Monica's dedication to an impossible task/a surprising pleasure/a task and pleasure that became an addiction: the Chronicle the true narrative of her existence on Earth: what interests her, what she paid attention to in what crossed her path. At first, never without pen and paper and, later, never without her little tape recorders."

Bibliography

Novels:

Headless World, McPherson & Co., 2022

The 30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition of The Other Planet, McPherson & Co., 2018
Hank Forest’s Party, Green Integer, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-933382-47-0
ABC Street, Green Integer 2002
The Other Planet, McPherson & Co.
The Menaced Assassin, McPherson & Co., 1989 (revised edition; original edition, 1982)

Stories:
Red Moon/Red Lake, McPherson & Co. 1988

Chapbooks:
Red Moon/Red Lake, Top Stories
Letter to an Unknown Woman, McPherson & Co.
Discovery of the World, Ghost Dance #22
Green Inventory, Ghost Dance #26

Anthologies:

Boxed Two Volume Set Top Stories, Primary Information, Brooklyn (2022)
The Living Underground: A Prose Anthology, Hugh Fox (Editor), Whitson Publishing Co.
15 Years in Exile, Exile Editions, Toronto, Canada
Top Top Stories, City Lights
Chouteau Review: Ten Year Retrospective
Chelsea: A Retrospective (Twenty-Five Years), Chelsea Associates
Likely Stories, McPherson & Co.
Pushcart Prize Anthology, III, Pushcart Press
Language and Structure in North America, Kensington Arts Assoc., Toronto
Chicago Review Two Volume International Survey of Innovative Fiction

Journals:
Action/Image; Annex; Aphra; Aspen Anthology; Assembling (multiple issues); Asylum Annual; Benzene; Beyond Baroque; Calyx; Central Park (multiple issues); Chelsea (multiple issues) ; Chicago Review (multiple issues); Chouteau Review; Coda; Confrontation; Cumberland Journal; Epoch; Exile (multiple issues); Gallimaufry; Interstate; Modernsense; New American Writing; Panache (multiple issues); Paris Review; Queen Street Magazine; Source; Sun & Moon; Tamarisk; Telephone; White Walls; Your Impossible Voice (multiple issues); Zone; Zone/Benzene

SPACE NOVEL (Installation and Events)

AS IT RETURNS: installation of two flat volumes (40 square feet and 33 square feet) of corresponding "pages," a book derived from the planes of the gallery space: Contemporary Arts Gallery, NYU

THE BLUE HANGAR: a narrative (text and activity) whose form and materials are derived from a large public environment with interior and exterior spaces; method of distribution adapted to mobile readership; Gateway National Recreation Area New York; sponsored by U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, American Crafts Council, Participation Project Foundation, Poets & Writers, Inc.

THE BLUE HANGAR: 12th Annual NY Avant Garde Festival, Gateway National Recreation Area

12 SIMULTANEOUS SUNDAYS: a novel written publicly over 12 Sundays, with installation and performance elements: Gegenschein Vaudeville Placenter

AS IT RETURNS: "Beyond the Page" exhibition, Y Poetry Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

AS IT RETURNS: models, photographs and related prose: University of Nevada

AS IT RETURNS: "TELIC" exhibition, Art Research Center, Kansas City, Missouri

SPACE NOVEL (Publications)

THE BLUE HANGAR: Partial text and photo-documentation, Queen Street Magazine (#10-11-12-13) Toronto

THE BLUE HANGAR: Photo-documentation and brief text, Coda (volume 3 #4)

THE BLUE HANGAR: Complete text and photo-documentation, Interstate (#12)

AS IT RETURNS: diagrams and partial text, Seventh Assembling

AS IT RETURNS: complete text, New American Writing

12 SIMULTANEOUS SUNDAYS, partial text, Zone (#7)

12 SIMULTANEOUS SUNDAYS, partial text, Benzene (volume 1 #4)

THE BLUE HANGAR: A SPACE NOVEL: Sun & Moon Archives

Selected Works

Fiction

Headless World

Ascher/Straus' ultimate novel, completed just before Sheila Ascher's death in December, 2020. A uniquely daring speculative novel that takes an unprecedented leap forward into a cosmos ordered by principles closer to "loop quantum gravity" theory in its approach to space and time than to any more traditional theory while tracking the life of an abandoned child navigating multiple channels of possible identities, family plots and destinies.

Stephen Beachy, author of Glory Hole and boneyard, has already written: ". . . as if an alien species that had devoured our memories was now using them to shift the syntax of our thoughts." And: "A strange object, unlike any other book you'll ever read, relentless, hilarious, a ferocious trance, a secret key." And Rachel Nagelberg, author of The Fifth Wall, writes: ". . . the hope of transcendence arrives in the form of a novel that escapes the spoor of endless mechanical reproduction, in a narrative-channel that defies any viral popular culture logic — it's a 'twirling spindle of infinity' . . . I'm so in love with this book."

The Other Planet (30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition)

"…one of the indispensible novels of the twentieth century, a complex and unsentimental examination of the tensions created by rapid social and technological change….This is fiction driven by ideas, ideas about the future, and the relentlessness of the everyday." --From Stephen Beachy's Foreword to the 30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition of The Other Planet.

Hank Forest's Party

Companion volume to ABC Street, chronicling the events and characters of ABC Street as they amble by, circling around and through Hank Forest’s party, while finding ways to suggest the warp of time.

ABC Street

The boundary between novel and journal: the passing world chronicled as fiction.

"ABC Street sends out ripples that change our reading of the other Ascher/Straus books, blurring lines of memory and realism and imagination. . . ."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

The Menaced Assassin

". . . characters – Celeste, the Dane or the Swede, the taxi driver, one or several men named Antonio – are . . . obsessed with the future and with the unlimited sense of possibility that only gets horribly reduced anytime a decision is made, meaning created."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

"...the best kind of experimental fiction--innovative and entertaining."
--Caryn James, The Village Voice

Red Moon/Red Lake

". . . dialogue at once so real and so unreal that it seems like the way people might talk in dreams. The way people would talk if they were possessed by a rare intelligence. . . ."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

A mysterious "novel-in-stories": "Some of the most stylish ‘post-modern fiction’ there is."
--John Strausbaugh, New York Press

The Other Planet

". . . Valeria is haunted by the sense that there's a completely different way to live, akin to living on another planet. . . . She journeys. . . through Ascher/Straus-world, a world where film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations collide to create a hyperreal and moody landscape."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

“. . . [an] absorbing, sexy and troubling reflection of these weird times. . . it should be read."
--John Strausbaugh, New York Press

QUICK LINKS

Authors Guild

Green Integer

McPherson & Company